Necroscope: The Mobius Murders Read Free Page B

Harry’s side of the door—there was more he desired to learn; not only of the killer himself but his location in the real world. For example, there was that poster on the corner of the brick wall.
    Harry believed he’d seen that poster before, in fact a good many of them, along with banners and colourful bunting, decorating Princes Street in central Edinburgh. Now he saw that he was correct; for beyond the wall’s corner the massive volcanic rock of Edinburgh Castle’s shrub-clad base was totally unmistakable. The murder had occurred in broad daylight, perhaps no more than an hour ago, right there in the city’s bustling centre!
    But there was more.
    Concurrent with the weird shrivelling of the victim’s life-thread, the fat man’s pale unhealthy face had seemed to thrive; it had suddenly developed a florid complexion, a reddening much deeper than a blush, and a totally evil aspect—an expression of monstrous, malignant satisfaction! And though the murderer’s features remained out of focus, indistinct, still in that self-same moment the Necroscope felt he could well be looking at the face of the Devil himself!
    Then once again, as Harry drifted closer to the door, there came that variant formula, this time in reverse, scrolling down the screen of his mind. Voided by the fat man, the door was now closing. But even as it collapsed, so the murderer’s expression abruptly changed, and he gave a massive start as at last he saw or sensed Harry there beyond the threshold!
    And the last thing Harry saw was the man’s bottom jaw falling open in a silent gasp, and his piggish eyes starting out in disbelief, as the door “slammed” soundlessly shut…
     

     
    The Necroscope went home, had a meal he barely tasted, showered and took to his bed just as the light began to fade. Somehow he felt drained, as if he too had suffered some kind of depletion, a sort of shrivelling. He dreamed, nightmared, and jerked awake. He slept again, dreamed, nightmared, came shuddering awake in a cold sweat. It was like that all night; he would no sooner fall asleep than he was there:
    Back in the Möbius Continuum or its time-streams: mathematical dimensions full of crumpled bodies, souls as flat as burst balloons, and whirling fleshless corpses whose coronas were lit by the ghostly, flickering glimmer of rotting toadstools rather than the steady blue glow of healthy life-threads!
    It wasn’t unusual for Harry to have nightmares—such as he was that was unavoidable—but his dreams were rarely as vivid or as monstrous as this! And morning’s light couldn’t come soon enough…
    He woke up yawning, reaching out over his bed, fumbling for the comforting presence of Bonnie Jean—who of course was not there. Nor would she be—not until he’d dealt with this thing, or at least investigated it to the best of his ability and perhaps set it to rights. He knew that the teeming dead, the Great Majority, would want it that way.
    After breakfast and a pot of coffee, he called Darcy Clarke at E-Branch HQ in London.
    Harry had worked in E-Branch however briefly (the “E” stood for ESPionage,) and he thought of Darcy as being foremost among only a handful of friends—even a close friend, or as close as most living people could ever get to the Necroscope. Harry knew that he owed the man one or two favours, but also that E-Branch owed him a far greater number. By E-Branch standards, however—considering the Branch’s “normal” line of work—the favour he was about to ask was only a very small one.
    But first there were the various security protocols, as the Head-of-Branch activated scrambler devices in his office, monitoring Harry and confirming his identity. Until finally:
    “Harry?” came Darcy’s voice down the wire. “What a pleasant surprise—I think! We don’t hear from you any too often these days—not often enough, anyway. But having said that, whenever we do hear from you I get these…oh, I don’t know, these nervous